Dude Perfect took more than $100 million from Highmount Capital. Alex Cooper’s Unwell just raised at a $500 million valuation. Ashley Flowers’ Audiochuck took $40 million from The Chernin Group. Beast Industries is valued in the billions. The money flowing into these companies is institutional now. The partnerships are institutional too - network television, live tours, national retail shelves, etc. These are not channels with merch lines anymore; they are the next big media holding companies.

To the category’s credit, it has been professionalizing. Holdcos have hired CEOs and presidents out of leagues, global brands, and platforms., The biggest have real review and crisis machinery too, because shipping into national retail forces it on you.

But hiring a CEO and building institutionalized operations are not the same thing. Businesses where the founder is the product are not new. Fashion houses and celebrity brands have done this for decades. One major difference is that none of those ran at the speed creators publish, with an audience this direct and platforms in the middle. DP POV: the creator holdco playbook is still being written and the category is writing it as it goes.

That is why last week is so important. Good Good Golf was running the same play as many of the above, raising $45 million in 2025 to expand across media, commerce, and live experiences. That expansion worked right up until one ad changed everything. Good Good and Callaway released a spot in which a man shoves a woman to the ground to sell a golf club - it was indefensible.

Within a week partnerships that took years to build were gone. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Golf Galaxy, PGA Tour Superstore, and Target pulled Good Good merchandise. Callaway ended a three-year partnership and admitted its “content review process was not comprehensive enough.” Good Good stepped away from its PGA Tour title sponsorship. Golf Channel canceled its show. By the end of the week the two partners were arguing in public over who had approved the ad with litigation on the table.

Baffling to many, the ad cleared reviews at both companies. Callaway - with decades of corporate marketing process - approved the spot before it aired and has admitted its review fell short. How that happened is a question for the two companies and at this point probably their lawyers.

Plenty of people are writing about how this happened and what to make of it but that’s not our lane nor what this piece is about. This is about what everyone else building in this category does from here forward.

The easy answer is the wrong one. Every founder and executive in this category watched last week and thought some version of, “we would never make that ad.” Of course that’s true, but it is also useless because Good Good would have said the same thing on August 20.

Aviation learned this a long time ago. The safest airlines are not the ones that say, “our pilots would never do that.” They are the ones that treat someone else’s failure as their own audit. Every crash gets investigated.he findings travel across the industry, and everyone gets better.

Good Good just paid for one of the most expensive operations reviews in creator history. The lesson is not the ad. It is what every other creator business learns from it.

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DISRUPTIVE PLAY: So the question is not how Good Good let this happen. The question is what every other Creator Holdco takes from it, learns, and gets better at?

Operations exist to protect what founders build, not to control them. The best operators watching this are already asking their teams what they need to do differently. Here are a few key questions worth asking and some potential paths to follow:

1. A tiered content review system

Key questions to ask: What content requires approval beyond the day-to-day content team, and what can ship without it? Who approves each level, by name? What automatically gets escalated? And when something almost crosses the line, do we learn from it or just move on?

Potential paths forward: Create three tiers. Everyday organic content ships the way it always ha and the creators own it. Anything paid or carrying a partner’s brand gets sign-off from one named senior person outside the content team with an answer inside 24 hours. Anything touching a pre-defined list of sensitive subjects automatically escalates to the top of the company, and to the partner when their brand is involved. Keep the criteria to one page and name every approver. Without a name, no one is accountable.

2. The dissenting voice in the room

The Good Good-Callaway ad did not ship because approvals weren’t secured. It shipped because nobody in either room was assigned to disagree. I lived this at Whistle. Too many people in a room want to agree because agreement feels like momentum. Forcing the disagreement made the conversations better and the outcomes better, not because the dissenter was usually right, but because the room had to answer them.

Key questions to ask: When everyone in our room loves an idea, whose job is it to argue the other side? Who is asking what are we missing and how could this hurt us or our partners even if we think it is funny and on brand?

Potential paths forward: Assign a dissenting voice to a team member and rotate the role so it belongs to the room rather than one person. The dissenter’s job is not to stop the work or have veto power. It is to make the strongest case against it before the decision is made. They can absolutely be overruled, but the concern must be heard and answered, not dismissed because everyone else is already aligned. “We all loved it” should never be the end of the review.

3. The partnership premortem

A dissenting voice challenges the thinking in the room. A premortem takes it one step further: before a major decision, assume it went wrong and ask why. Beri Meric, founder of IVY, has preached this for years. Ask what could go wrong before you start, not because you doubt the idea, but because the idea deserves it.

Key questions to ask: Before our last major deal, did we ask how it could go wrong? What could put the partnership, or the rest of our business, at risk?

Potential paths forward: Before every major deal, get the team in a room and assume the partnership failed. What happened? What could we have done to prevent it? Use those answers to decide what needs to be agreed upfront, what protections belong in the contract and what both sides need to do differently once the deal is live.

4. The bad week exercise

Key questions to ask: If something happens tonight that puts the company, a founder or someone on the team in the headlines, who gets the first call? Who is our single voice? Who calls our employees, investors and major partners before they read about it somewhere else? Do we know our partners’ crisis contacts by name? Have we ever actually run the bad week as a drill? And who takes the phone at 2 a.m. when instinct is screaming to respond?

Potential paths forward: Build the bad-week plan before you have one. Name the internal team, outside counsel and communications lead who get the first calls. Know who owns each major relationship and in what order they get contacted. For major partnerships, have crisis contacts on both sides and agree in advance on how you communicate when the issue affects both companies. Then run one exercise a year around something nobody wants to imagine happening as a drill. This costs an afternoon of time, the real thing can cost the company.

5. Business concentration and the floor

The more a creator business grows, the more dependent it can become on partners and platforms. A major partner can walk. A platform can change its algorithm or economics. The part of the business you truly control is what remains when those things happen. That is your floor.

Key questions to ask: If we looked at every dollar by where it’s coming from, partners, platforms or directly from our audience, what would the split be? Which dollars could disappear together on the same bad day? How many months could we run payroll if a major partner walked? And how much of our audience do we actually control - the email list, the customer file, the direct channels, versus renting through a platform’s algorithm?

Potential paths forward: Know the answers and revisit them regularly. Keep enough cash to give yourself time if something goes wrong. Build more revenue that comes directly from your audience and invest in ways to reach them without relying on a platform or partner. And on the partnerships that matter most, negotiate for what happens if things go wrong, including what happens if both sides approve the work and the partner still walks away. You will not win every protection, but you should ask. Even YouTube is rented. Your customer data and direct relationship with your audience are not.

Final Thoughts

Nothing about last week weakens the case for creator holdcos. The companies on this road are building something new, which is exactly why the playbook is incomplete.

The questions above only matter if the findings travel. Crashes made flying safer because every airline read the report, not just the one that lost the plane. Right now every holdco learns alone, in private, after its own bad week. Founders should be calling each other this month, and funds should be walking these questions through their portfolios, because the category gets safer together or not at all.

And aviation’s last lesson: the airline flies again. Rooting for Good Good’s comeback is not taking Good Good’s side. The ad was indefensible and the accountability fight belongs to the two companies and their lawyers. But a category where one bad week is a death sentence is a category where every company hides its problems, and hidden problems are how the next bad week gets worse. The comeback matters for everyone building here.

Last week Salah was introduced to more than 30,000 fans at Papara Park in Trabzon. One of the best players of his generation, having won almost everything, chose to close out his career at a club that sits behind Istanbul’s big three. However the story isn’t just that he pick the Black Sea Storm over Besiktas. What’s interesting is that the Saudi Pro Leagued tried harder, offered more and still couldn’t land him.

Al Ittihad had chased Salah since 2023, when Liverpool rejected a rumoured £150m bid. When he hit free agency this year, Al Ittihad, Al Hilal and Al Qadsiah all came back for him, spending months in talks with reports putting Saudi offers as high $25 million a year - a reported $5 million more than he will be making in Turkey. The logic was the same as it always was. Salah is a lethal forward can carry a team, speaks Arabic and is a devout Muslim. A generation of kids from Morocco to Iraq sees a star who speaks their language and shares their background. The shirt sales alone would have covered a chunk of the deal.

Salah took less money to keep playing meaningful football in Europe instead. He signed for Trabzonspor.

Compare that to the arrival of Ronaldo in December 2022 - who was soon followed by Benzema, Kante, Mahrez. The plan was to buy a seat at the top table inside of three years. What followed was a pullback, with league officials repositioning the priority as youth development rather than final pay checks for aging stars.

The repositioning was cover for a harder truth. The league had spent enormous money and generated almost no durable interest, at home or abroad. That is the same place the Chinese Super League landed between 2015 and 2017, when Ramires, Oscar, Tevez and Hulk disappeared into it and the audience never followed.

The money was never the constraint. The product was.

Where the Formula Broke

1. Stars don’t fix competition. Bring in the names and the fans will follow only works if the match is worth watching. Who was Ronaldo actually facing every week? A giant among Lilliputians makes for a highlight, not a fixture list. A team is only as good as the eleven on the pitch, and a league is only as good as the twenty teams in it.

2. It bought broadcast infrastructure for a product that wasn’t ready. The production and distribution deal with IMG was the sporting equivalent of no one gets fired for hiring IBM. Safe choice, wrong sequence. Rights buyers were already cutting budgets, and no amount of camera angles creates demand that doesn’t exist.

3. The match-day product never got the money. Officials kept telling us local fans were the priority. More than 60% of Saudi citizens are under 30, which is roughly 12 million young people looking for something to do on a Friday night. Then they were offered dilapidated or multi-purpose stadiums with no comforts and no concessions. Boulevard City in Riyadh has esports, food and shopping. That is who the SPL is actually competing with for the entertainment dollar, and it showed up empty-handed. We saw this firsthand when Disruptive Play visited a couple of years back.

4. It picked the fight on the incumbents’ turf. A live match costs a fan two hours. Once you ask an international viewer to treat you as a second league, you are competing with the Premier League and La Liga for the same slot, and their loyalties are decades deep. There is only so much time and brainspace to go around. Better production doesn’t win that trade.

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DISRUPTIVE PLAY: If the SPL can't win 12 million young Saudis, what's the point of the superstars?

The SPL has eight years until it hosts a World Cup, and enormous investment is coming regardless. That money can go into the same playbook that already failed, or it can build something the region actually uses. The route exists. The Kings League has run it, and Baller League is moving toward it. It is just less glamorous than a Ronaldo unveiling.

1. Distribute social first. The SPL is not going to make meaningful money selling live rights to broadcasters or streamers. The audience it needs is on social platforms, and those platforms keep adding live tools and monetization. Put the VOD there. Put the live product there. Be the first major league to treat social as the primary window instead of the trailer.

2. Own Arabic. The algorithm still serves local language to local viewers, so stop confusing it with a mixed-language strategy. UNFPA puts the Arab region’s 15 to 29 cohort at roughly 110 million people. The SPL should be the dominant Arabic-language football offering on every platform, with no ambiguity about who it is talking to.

3. Break the unwritten football IP rules. Everyone remembers the Saudi national team half-time speech against Argentina in Qatar. Since then, nothing. Silence from the changing room, nothing from the training pitch, almost no access to players away from the ground. A challenger league cannot play by the incumbents’ access rules. Highlights of an unfamiliar league sold to fans who don’t know the team names will never move.

4. Give creators equity in clubs. MENA has some of the most inventive creators anywhere. Flying them in for a match visit buys a post. Giving them a stake buys a decade. The Kings League proved the mechanic with streamer-owned clubs from day one. Imagine AboFlah livestreaming commentary on a match where he owns part of the club.

5. Run social like a network, not a marketing channel. SPL clubs are not competing with each other. They are all competing for attention against everything else on the phone. The league should centralize resources, share data, set the standard and force cross-promotion between clubs.

6. Build a match day that social fandom wants to attend. World Cup investment should fix the facilities, with one warning. Qatar built eight stadiums above 40,000 seats for 2022, which is a lot of empty red plastic on a normal league night. Scale the capacity back afterwards. Then run promotional nights where creators actually show up, build vlogging positions in the style of AFTV, and give creators the same player access the press gets. Make it about more than 90 minutes of football.

Final Thoughts

There is a scene in Moneyball where Peter Brand tells Billy Beane that losing Damon off the payroll opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities. The SPL was ready to pay Mo Salah $25 million a year and lost him anyway. That money is still sitting there.

The first phase bought famous players and rented an audience that never converted. Salah just confirmed the ceiling on that approach. A league that can outbid Europe and still lose to it has a product problem, not a payroll problem. The second phase can buy the audience directly. One of those is a transfer fee. The other is a business.

The tournament ended Sunday when Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in New Jersey, and the confetti, the montage, and the record television number all went to the team that won the final.

Go back a couple of weeks, though. England beat Norway 2-1 in Miami, in extra time, and Erling Haaland finished his World Cup on the bench. Norway’s first World Cup in 28 years ended at the quarterfinal, and Haaland still won the tournament.

That is not a metaphor. Measure it. He arrived in June with 40 million Instagram followers and added more than 20 million during the tournament, the largest gain of any outfield player in the field. His public Snapchat passed five million subscribers, and the YouTube channel where he vlogged the entire run roughly doubled to over three million. Google built him a custom Easter egg. Nike put him in its tournament spot next to LeBron James and Kim Kardashian, with Channing Tatum serving as his comedic body double. He scored seven goals in five games, which tied a record for a World Cup debut that had stood since 1974, and the goals were still the second most interesting thing he did all month.

Everyone Is Writing This Story. No One Is Thinking About It Like This.

Let’s be upfront, because the Haaland takes are already a genre. Digiday has the CMO lessons. Fortune credits American influencers for making him viral. Inc. calls the ponytail a branding masterclass. Robb Report has the fashion angle, Outlook Business has the empire valuation, and every marketing newsletter on this platform has reached the same one-word conclusion: authenticity.

Call it authenticity and the story ends when the tournament does. And to be clear, everyone who paid got paid: FIFA cleared record revenue, Fox sold through its inventory, and the sponsors got the biggest audiences American television has delivered in years. But all of that was income from the moment, and when the moment ended, the meter stopped. Haaland is the only one still collecting. He walked out of the summer with a direct line to more than 60 million people, and none of the parties who staged the event keep a single one of them.

The existing coverage reads him as a personality story or a branding story, and both readings are true as far as they go. The problem is that personality stories aren’t repeatable, because you either have Haaland’s charm or you don’t, which makes “be authentic” the least useful advice in media. The branding stories, meanwhile, are written for the brands orbiting him, the sponsors and trendjackers renting his moment for as long as it lasts.

Here is what everyone is missing: the World Cup ended Sunday for everyone who paid for it. It did not end for Haaland. The 60 million people he picked up this summer follow him to Manchester, to every broadcast, to whatever he does next, for free, for the rest of his career. FIFA built the stage. He left with the crowd.

Last month, before the knockout rounds, we wrote that the game is 90 minutes and the cultural IP lasts. The broadcast rights to the moment sold for billions while the meaning around the moment sits barely owned, and creators were proving it from the outside through the food lens, the music house, and the street brand.

Haaland proved it from the inside. A player, the one asset class everyone assumed was fully priced, ran the same play from the middle of the pitch.

The rights to the 90 minutes were sold years ago. Haaland took the other 38 days without asking anyone, and he did it with a phone, a pair of boots, and a tee time.

Haaland Didn’t Tour America. He Localized It.

The run is worth walking through city by city, because the geography is the strategy.

Boston is where Norway returned after 28 years away and beat Iraq, which was the sporting story. The cultural story began once the team left the group stage and Haaland started treating each host city as its own episode.

Dallas. Hours after scoring the 86th-minute winner against Ivory Coast, he walked into Wild Bill’s Western Store downtown and bought snakeskin boots, a longhorn belt buckle, and cowboy hats custom-stamped with his initials and number. He put on a “Y’all Can Kiss My Dallas” shirt and posted the whole visit to Snapchat, including his teammates roasting him at the register (”Look at this loser, drinking water.” / “They complain when I order water, but when I score goals they zip it up”). Fox News picked it up, local news picked it up, and the store nearly sold out of the shirt within days.

New York. He scored twice in the last eleven minutes to beat Brazil, then took the drumstick from Ødegaard and led the Viking row from the pitch. When Google turned the celebration into a search animation days later, his entire distribution strategy was a single post on X: “One thing to do today… search my name on Google.” He didn’t buy the placement. He was the placement.

Miami. On his off day before the England quarterfinal he played Turnberry Isle in Aventura and posted the round, at which point the internet learned that his father had wanted him to become a professional golfer. The storyline was sitting there waiting, and all he had to do was reveal it.

@kotikvdele7#haaland #miami #worldcup #fifa #футбол

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And everywhere in between. He sat in the stands at a Stanley Cup Final and told reporters the American anthem gave him goosebumps. He played shuffleboard and table tennis on Corden’s After Hours. A pre-match handshake with a kid mascot traveled further than most brand campaigns this year. His own summary of the operation: “I like Americans. They’re hilarious. I like the way they are.”

Dallas got cowboy, New York got the row, and Miami got golf. Each market saw itself through his lens, which stayed playful and curious without ever turning condescending, and each market adopted him for it. Most global brands run one campaign across the United States. Haaland ran four, and every one of them was local.

Watch the run again, though, and it was never really about the cities. The same five decisions repeat at every stop, and together they add up to something you can actually use.

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DISRUPTIVE PLAY: The Haaland Playbook

The lazy read is authenticity, and authenticity is not a strategy. Strip out the football and the charm and what remains is an operating manual: five decisions, each one repeatable, and each one the opposite of what a media-trained athlete or a media-trained brand is coached to do.

1. Localize, don’t broadcast.

The default for anyone with 40 million followers is one global message, focus-grouped to offend no one and belong nowhere. Haaland inverted it, and every city got its own storyline built from that city’s own iconography, discovered in real time.

The operator test: when you show up in a new market, does the market see itself in your content, or does it see your content passing through?

2. Participate, don’t comment.

He never posted about cowboy culture from a distance. He spent his own money on the boots, wore the shirt out of the store, and led the row himself. Participation reads as respect while commentary reads as tourism, and audiences can tell the difference in a single frame.

The operator test: in your last cultural play, did you buy anything, wear anything, or risk anything, or did you caption it?

3. Phone, not production.

The content that moved twenty million followers was Snapchat stories and vlogs shot without a crew, without a color grade, and posted the night everything happened. For everyone who paid for polished broadcast, the tournament’s most distributed clips were phone-shot, talent-owned, and off-schedule. The Nike spot amplified a phenomenon rather than creating one, which is creativity before capital running at the highest altitude in sport: the production caught up to the audience, never the other way around.

The operator test: if you halved your production budget, would the audience notice, or would you just move faster?

4. Ensemble, not solo.

His teammates roasted him for ordering water, Ødegaard handed over the drumstick, his girlfriend beat him at shuffleboard on network television, and a nine-year-old mascot got a handshake that circled the world. Haaland ran his feed as a cast, which turned every episode into a network of teammates, partners, kids, and influencers who redistributed his content without a dollar of paid media. The whole Norway squad became supporting characters in a show only he was producing. Cast, not campaign.

The operator test: look at your last ten posts and count who else appears in them. If the answer is nobody, nobody else has a reason to spread them.

5. Deflate, don't hype.

Asked about beating Brazil, he said "Uh… very slim." Asked after he beat them whether his outlook had changed, he said "Really low, still," and then told the press to "put every single pressure on the English lads." Every deflection lowered the stakes, so every win landed as found money and the exit landed soft. He managed expectations the way a good founder manages a raise, and it made him more likable per goal than anyone scoring at his rate has ever been. Compare that with IShowSpeed, who had a massive World Cup of his own but runs a model built on escalation, where every stream has to top the last one because the hype is the product. Haaland built the opposite machine. The bar never rises, so every win clears it.

The operator test: does your audience root for you, or keep score on you? Every promise you make moves people from the first group to the second.

None of this required a rights deal, a media company, or a dollar of paid distribution. It required a point of view and the nerve to post it the same night.

Why This Should Worry the People Who Paid

We made this argument in the 90-minutes piece a month ago. The tournament just finished making it for us.

FIFA sold the moment, Fox bought the broadcast, and sponsors bought the boards (and hydration breaks) all of it priced against the matches, and all of it earned back what it was supposed to earn. But the thing that keeps producing after the lights went off happened on a Snap account none of them control, run by a player whose team never reached the semifinal.

The followers don’t reset when the tournament ends. Everyone else rented the audience for a month, and Haaland keeps his. The broadcaster’s audience went home Sunday night, while Haaland’s audience goes with him to Manchester, to every Premier League broadcast, and to whatever he launches next. Early audience reads from TikTok, press profiles, and brand case studies suggest his new followers skew American, female, and new to football, arriving through lifestyle clips more than match highlights. He walked into the largest sports market on earth as a soccer player and walked out as an American celebrity, and the entire acquisition cost was a shopping trip and a green fee.

The audience already converts, too. Haaland bought a minority stake in Bon Dep, the Norwegian company behind the Kknekki hair ties he wears, back in 2024, and when the Haaland Edition launched in June it sold out. He holds equity in the product his content distributes, which tells you this was never merely a personality story. The wardrobe, the vlogs, and the hair are pieces of an ecosystem he owns, not a media kit for someone else’s campaign.

The takeaway for anyone holding rights: if your media contracts treat player-owned vertical content as an afterthought, you are giving away the way most new fans now discover your event, and the most durable audience asset your event creates is walking out the door in a player’s pocket.

Every player in that tournament had the same 38 days. One of them treated the host country as a format.

Final Thoughts

Spain gets the trophy and the record books, and deserves both. But the most valuable outcome of the American World Cup, a global superstar acquiring an American audience of twenty million in 30 days at zero media spend, belongs to a player who went home in the quarterfinals.

If you are an athlete, or you manage one, the tournament is the occasion. What lasts is the audience still following you when it ends, and this summer proved that audience gets built in western stores and golf carts, not in mixed zones.

If you are a rights holder or a sponsor, you paid for the moment and Haaland took the meaning. The next negotiation should account for the fact that the most distributed content of your event will be shot vertically, by the talent, for free.

And if you are building anything at all, remember that he out-imagined everyone at the biggest media event on earth with a phone, a sense of humor, and a genuine interest in the place he was visiting.

The playbook was accessibility. The distribution was joy. The budget was a pair of boots.

“Creator-led” might be the most used and least understood phrase in media right now. Everyone is saying it. Almost no one means the same thing by it.

Most people hear a tactic. They think its means have a creator post something, partner on an activation, collab on a show, get a big name to make content. All of that is part of it, and all of it misses the actual point by a mile.

Creator-led is a way of thinking and a way of building. The reason I keep insisting on the term, even when it earns me a confused look, is that this way of building can be turned into a system, something repeatable that you can install into a business that already exists or use to stand up a new one from scratch.

When I say creator-led, I am describing how you build, not who you hire, and the moment you see it as a system, you can put it anywhere.

Creativity Before Capital

Here is the part that gets romanticized and then missed. The people who build this way almost never start with money, and more to the point, they never needed much. Good Good was a few friends and a camera. Alex Cooper had a microphone and a point of view. The Savannah Bananas reinvented a failing baseball team with almost nothing. MrBeast made hundreds of scrappy videos before there was a company to speak of. They did not out-produce anyone. They out-imagined everyone, earned an audience one idea at a time, and only spent real money once they had proof that something was working.

Creator-led is how they build, and just as much, how they get in. They earn the audience with creativity before they ever spend money on it, which is exactly why the model is so capital efficient.

That scrappiness looks like a charming backstory, but it is really where the capital efficiency comes from. Audiences reward originality and authenticity over polish, so a good idea shot on a phone beats an expensive production of a mediocre one, every time. These builders led with the idea, let real demand form, and only then poured money into making it bigger. The production caught up to the audience, never the other way around.

It is the discipline most well-funded businesses forget they are allowed to have. Money makes you lazy. Hand a team a large budget and the reflex is to make everything look expensive before anyone has proven the idea works, which is how most capital in this industry gets set on fire. Creator-led inverts the order. You find the creative way in first, let the audience tell you what is actually IP, and only then put real capital behind the thing that is already pulling. The rare and valuable discipline is doing that at scale, when you have enough money to over-produce everything and refuse to. Test cheap, make a lot, listen hard, and put the budget only behind what is already working.

The scrappy start and the ecosystem it becomes are the same story.

Let’s Look at What Is Actually Being Built

MrBeast: the videos are the on-ramp, the business is Beast Industries.

Everyone knows the videos, and fewer people notice that they have quietly become a distribution engine for something much bigger. That something is Beast Industries. Feastables sits on grocery shelves. Beast Games runs on Amazon. Vyro, his clipping marketplace, pays fans and editors to cut and spread his content, which turns his own audience into a distribution force. Beast Land, the theme park he built inside Riyadh Season in Saudi Arabia, covered roughly two million square feet of rides and real-world challenges pulled straight from his videos. Content brings the audience in the door, the audience becomes the asset, and the real value shows up downstream in the products, the experiences, and the franchises.

His own CEO says it out loud. Jeff Housenbold describes MrBeast as the Mickey Mouse of a company he is trying to grow into a modern-day Disney, the way Mickey eventually shared the universe with Minnie and Donald, and then with Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar. He points out that the company is called Beast Industries and not MrBeast Industries on purpose, because he is building the system rather than the single star.

Now look across the landscape because this is not a MrBeast anomaly.

Alex Cooper: one microphone into a network, a product, and an agency.

She built the same shape out of a single podcast. Call Her Daddy became the anchor, and she grew the Unwell Network on top of it, signing hosts like Alix Earle and Madeline Argy and selling the whole slate through a nine-figure deal with SiriusXM. From there came Unwell Hydration, a drink line made with Nestlé and sold in Target, and then Unwell Creative Agency, an advertising business backed by a partnership with Google. By her own account, roughly fifty million people engage with Unwell every day. The podcast was the audience engine, and the network, the product line, and the agency are the ecosystem she built on top of it.

Emma Chamberlain: one owned audience, one consumer brand.

She took her audience in a more focused direction and turned Chamberlain Coffee into a real consumer brand, now stocked in roughly ten thousand stores and anchored by physical cafes in Los Angeles. Her content acquires the audience, and the coffee business converts that attention into something she owns on the shelf and on the street.

Jesser, Colin, and Samir: the holding-company move.

Two more, quickly, because the pattern is the point. Jesser, a basketball YouTuber, rolled his content channel and his Bucketsquad apparel brand under a single parent company, JesserCo, built to launch more brands underneath. Colin and Samir turned their show about the creator economy into a media company, with a newsletter called The Publish Press and a paid education product called Creator Startup sitting behind the videos. The shape is the same at a different scale, an audience engine on top and a business built underneath.

Podpah: a podcast becomes a culture.

In Brazil, it started as a podcast, grew into the biggest one in the country, and became a cultural platform from there. It now runs food and music programming, produces live events, and breaks new artists, alongside repeat product collaborations with Oakley across eyewear, apparel, and footwear. The podcast is the audience engine, and the value lives in every vertical they have built on top of it.

Dude Perfect: content into a physical destination.

They began with trick-shot videos, took more than $100 million from Highmount Capital, and built an 80,000-square-foot headquarters and entertainment facility in Frisco, Texas, complete with a basketball court, a turf field, a retail store, a streaming service, live experiences, and consumer products. They are building a destination and a brand, with the channel as the first turn of the flywheel.

Good Good: a creator collective becomes a sports property.

This is the one that should stop a league operator cold. It started in 2020 as a golf YouTube collective, built to more than 1.75 million subscribers by blending competition, entertainment, and lifestyle, with its own roster playing alongside pros like Bryson DeChambeau and Rickie Fowler. From that audience it built an apparel brand now pushing into thousands of pro shops, a slate of live experiences, and recurring match formats that function as competition IP of its own. It raised $45 million in a round led by Creator Sports Capital, with Manhattan West and Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions alongside, and it became the first digital-first golf brand to put its name on a PGA Tour event, the Good Good Championship. A group that started making videos now owns competition formats, a product line, live events, and institutional capital. That is a creator collective turning into a sports property in real time.

The Savannah Bananas: the operating system, installed onto baseball.

Here is where the skeptic pushes back. Every one of these is internet-native, so of course the model is baked in. What about the physical, tradition-bound world of live sports, where the audience skews old and the format has barely changed in a century? The Savannah Bananas are the answer. In 2016, Jesse and Emily Cole went nearly two million dollars into debt to take over a struggling collegiate baseball team, and they never raised a dollar of outside capital. They rebuilt the most tradition-bound sport in America into their own format, Banana Ball, with its own rules and its own name, and ran it through the exact operating system described here. The format is the IP. The audience is owned, with more than thirty-five million social followers and a ticket waitlist that has passed four million people. The live show is the business, selling out MLB and NFL stadiums, with 102,000 fans at Kyle Field in a single night. They kept the games free on YouTube, prioritizing the direct relationship over a rights fee. The result is more than $100 million in revenue, over $50 million of it in merchandise, and a profit, in a year when eleven MLB clubs lost money. The enterprise is valued near half a billion dollars, with reported buyout offers approaching a billion. No one handed the Bananas a broadcast deal or a legacy audience. They installed the operating system onto baseball itself and out-drew, out-earned, and out-grew the century-old teams around them.

These examples are different people in different countries and categories, from a chocolate bar to a podcast network to a reinvented baseball league, and the shape is identical every time. Content is the cheapest and fastest way any of them have ever had to acquire an audience they actually own, and the real business gets built downstream, in products, live experiences, membership, and new verticals. Every one of them is running an ecosystem, and the content is only the part you can see from the outside.

Learn More About Disruptive Play

Disruptive Play Partners with Investors, Founders and C-suite Leaders Challenging Industry Norms at the Intersection of Sport, Media and the Creator Economy.

DISRUPTIVE PLAY: So What Is a Creator-Led Operating System and How Can You Apply It to Your Business?

A podcaster, a coffee founder, a golf collective, and a baseball team that reinvented the sport are not in the same business at all. But look at how each one is built, and the structure has many similarities. The only question that matters is what we call it.

We call it an operating system. A Creator-Led OS. Like any operating system, it does not force everyone to build the same thing. It gives everyone the same foundation to build their own thing on. The way iOS runs a bank, a game, and a newspaper without any of them resembling each other, a Creator-Led OS runs a chocolate brand, a golf tour, and a baseball league. The businesses look nothing alike. The operating system underneath them is the same.

From our DP POV, it is the layer everything else runs on, and it sets the defaults before you make a single tactical decision. It runs on five things, and each one is a business decision with money attached, not a slogan. Underneath each one is a short set of questions to ask about your own business. The honest answers tell you fast whether you are running an ecosystem or a single surface with good production values.

1. Creativity before capital.

This is the one we opened with, and it comes first for a reason. The idea and the format win, not the production budget. The builders who break through start cheap, make a lot, learn fast, and only pour real money into production once they know what people actually want.

• Audiences reward originality over polish. A good idea shot on a phone beats an expensive production of a weak one, every time, so the smart money goes to imagination first and finish later. The mistake is producing like a broadcaster, big crews and high gloss, for content nobody has asked for yet.

• Cheap and fast is a strategy, not a limitation. It lets you make more, test more, and find the format the audience actually wants before you have spent real money. The Savannah Bananas did not out-spend Major League Baseball on production. They out-imagined it, proved the demand on almost nothing, and scaled from there.

The operator test. Ask yourself:

• Are you spending on production to look professional, or because the audience is asking for more? One is vanity. The other is demand.

• If you halved your production budget, would the audience notice, or would you just move faster and learn more?

• Are you confusing production value with value? The audience rewards the idea, not the finish.

2. Build repeatable IP, not disposable content.

The asset is the format you can run again and extend, not the post you published once.

• Content depreciates the day it goes live. A repeatable format appreciates, because you can rerun it at a lower marginal cost, license it, and extend it into new revenue lines.

• Hot Ones is the cleanest proof: one format, 350-plus episodes, extended into a hot-sauce line and licensing. The format is the asset, not any single episode.

• Good Good turned its recurring match formats into competition IP that carried all the way onto the PGA Tour, which no single viral clip could ever do.

The operator test. Ask yourself:

• If you went dark for ninety days, what would you still own that holds value? If the honest answer is an archive nobody revisits, you have content, not IP.

• Which of your recurring shows, characters, or events could run a hundred more times and still work without you personally in the frame? Name it, because that is your real format IP.

• Could you license it, franchise it, or turn it into a product tomorrow without reinventing it? If not, it is not yet built to travel.

3. Own the relationship, not just the reach.

Everyone builds on rented platforms, and that is the right place to start. The mistake is stopping there. The job is to convert borrowed platform reach into a direct relationship you actually control, through email, membership, first-party data, and community.

• Rented reach carries platform risk and a rising cost to acquire. An owned relationship lowers acquisition cost on every future launch and raises lifetime value.

• When Unwell Hydration hit Target, Alex Cooper was not buying an audience. She was activating fifty million people she already owned, which is how a brand-new drink lands in national retail on day one.

• The Savannah Bananas keep their games free on YouTube and prioritize that direct relationship over a rights fee, because a direct audience of more than thirty-five million followers and a waitlist past four million people is worth more to them than any single broadcast deal.

The operator test. Ask yourself:

• What share of your audience can you reach tomorrow without paying a platform, through email, SMS, membership, or community? If it is close to zero, you are renting.

• If the algorithm changed overnight, how much of your revenue would still be there next quarter?

• When you launch something new, do you start from a warm audience you own or a cold audience you have to buy? The distance between those two is your real moat.

4. Design for offline from the start, not as an afterthought.

The audience gets built online, but the real depth and the real margin almost always show up offline, in a coffee shop, a cookbook, a live tour, a theme park. The mistake is treating that physical chapter as something you sort out later. You decide from the beginning how what you build online is going to manifest in the real world, and you point everything toward it.

• Online is where you build the audience, cheap and wide and fast. Offline is where you deepen and monetize it, costlier and narrower but higher-margin and far stickier. That is exactly why the physical destination cannot be an afterthought, because it is where the business actually gets paid.

• Ask the question early: how does this become physical? Emma Chamberlain’s videos were always heading toward a coffee brand and a cafe. MrBeast’s challenges were always heading toward Beast Land. The Savannah Bananas built a show designed to fill stadiums. The physical payoff was planned in, not bolted on.

• Dude Perfect raised more than $100 million from Highmount Capital to turn a free YouTube audience into ticketed live experiences, retail, and a physical entertainment destination in Frisco, Texas. That destination was the plan, not a surprise the audience stumbled into.

The operator test. Ask yourself:

• Do you know how your audience ultimately becomes something physical and higher-margin, the shop, the tour, the product, the venue? If you cannot name it, you are building half a business.

• Did you plan the offline from the start, or are you bolting it on now that an audience has shown up?

• Which P&L does your offline sit in, a marketing cost or a profit center?

5. Wire everything together so each part makes the others worth more

Share IP, data, talent, and sponsors across every surface, so each new one makes the others more valuable.

• When the parts are disconnected, they add up in a straight line. When they are wired together, they multiply. What you learn about your audience in one place makes every other place smarter and cheaper to grow, and a sponsor who buys across your content, your live events, and your products pays more and stays longer than three one-off deals ever would.

• Podpah’s Oakley relationship is an integrated program across content, product drops, and cultural moments, which yields more and retains better than a one-off sponsorship.

• At the Savannah Bananas, the social following feeds the ticket waitlist, the waitlist feeds a $50 million merchandise business, and the whole thing feeds a valuation near half a billion dollars, all of it profitable while eleven MLB clubs lost money. Every surface pulls the others up.

The operator test. Ask yourself:

• When you add something new, does everything you already run get more valuable, or just busier?

• Does what you learn in one part of the business make the rest smarter, or does every part start from scratch?

• Can a partner buy across your whole business in a single conversation, or only one piece at a time? One commands a premium. The other is a rate card.

Run all five together and you re-rate the business from a content multiple to a platform multiple. You can do it without hiring a single creator, as long as you operate the way one would. Take those 15 questions into any IP business, your own included, and you will know within an afternoon which surfaces are load-bearing and which are just noise. The whole system is portable, which is the real point. It does not belong only to the person with the following. You can lift it off the individual creator and install it into a business that already exists, whether that is a league, a media brand, a rights holder, or a consumer product, or use it to build a new one on purpose.

This Isn’t New. Walt Drew It in 1957.

Here is why the Beast-Industries-as-Disney line should stop you. Disney is the original version of this. In 1957, Walt Disney sketched a now-famous one-page map of his company by hand. Films sat in the dead center. Theme parks, television, music, publishing, and merchandise radiated outward, and every arrow ran in both directions. The television show marketed the films and the park. The park sold the films and the merchandise. The films filled the park. Acquired, in its recent deep dive, calls this the birth of the flywheel and argues that Walt invented the modern model almost by accident.

That map is the Creator-Led OS, seventy years early. The IP sat at the hub, and everything else existed to monetize it. The surfaces fed each other instead of sitting in silos, and Walt even used the ABC television deal to finance Disneyland, running screen and physical park as one system decades before anyone used the word omnichannel. The flywheel did not assemble itself either. Someone architected it, and that someone was a twice-failed animator who started from zero, dead broke, and had to build the whole ecosystem himself, because no one handed him a studio, a network, or an audience.

Walt spent decades discovering the flywheel, and it stayed locked to the studio, the broadcast deal, and the parks he owned. The creators rebuilt it in a few years with none of that infrastructure. The blueprint is now the cheap part.

You no longer have to stumble into the shape after years of trial and near-bankruptcy. You can start on day one with the entire ecosystem in mind and build to a blueprint, with a Creator-Led OS as the operating layer underneath it. That is exactly what these creators proved, and it is the whole reason this is worth naming.

Two Ways to Run It

There are two ways to put this operating system to work, and they are not interchangeable.

Install it into what already exists. Take an asset that already holds IP and an audience, a league, a media brand, a rights holder, a consumer brand, and rebuild it around the five principles. The audience is often already there. The job is to find the format IP the business has never built out, wire the online and offline surfaces together, and connect them so they compound. The Savannah Bananas did this to baseball itself, an old sport with an aging audience, and the hard part is rarely the format. It is getting an organization designed for the last era to actually rewire itself before the value leaks away.

Build to the blueprint from day one. Start a new venture with the entire ecosystem in mind, so the format IP, the owned audience, the offline surfaces, and the connections between them are all designed in from the first move rather than bolted on later. The hard part here is discipline. The pull is always to just make content and chase the audience, and the work is to keep building the surfaces while that audience is still small.

Both are open now for one reason. The model is known and cheap to run, which was never true for Walt.

Final Thoughts

The businesses being bought and built today were mostly designed for the last era of media. The people buying them know how to value them and structure the deal. What is harder to find is someone who can operate them in this one, someone who understands where the audience actually lives, how distribution actually works, and how to build the commercial model around that reality.

If you are a founder, decide what your ownable IP is and architect the surfaces as one connected system from the start. If you are running an existing IP business, the real question is whether your content, your events, and your commerce are one ecosystem or a set of silos that never feed each other, because the silos are where the value leaks out. If you are capital, the discipline is to value the ecosystem the IP could become, and to ask whether anyone on the team actually knows how to install this operating system.

That is the scarce skill. Making content, running an event, or launching a product is common. Taking one piece of IP and architecting all of it into a system that compounds is what almost no one can do.

The next great IP company will be architected, not discovered, by whoever installs this operating system into a business that is not yet running it.

So when I say creator-led, this is what I mean. It is a way of building, turned into an operating system, proven first by the creators who had no safety net, and ready now to run deliberately, with real IP, real capital, and real scale behind it.

Disruptive Play partners with investors, founders, and C-suite leaders challenging industry norms at the intersection of sport, media, and the creator economy. If this resonated, forward it to someone still building one surface at a time.

When the World Cup kicked off June 11, the planet started doing something it almost never does anymore: watching the same thing at the same time.

Six billion people over 39 days. Same ball, same goals, same heartbreak. There is no series finale, no album drop, no election night that comes close. The match is the last truly shared experience on earth.

Then…

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Ask almost anyone in sports why their YouTube channel is going to work, and you get a version of the same answer: the footage is world-class, the fans are passionate, so we put it up and they come. It is the most repeated line in the industry, and it is the most expensive thing we tell ourselves, because it isn’t true. Putting sport on YouTube is not a …

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Back at Whistle, we made a bet that fandom no longer lived only inside the live broadcast. The thesis was that a new generation of fans was forming through sports-a-tainment, athlete personalities, behind-the-scenes content, and creator-led storytelling. We argued it eight years before it became conventional wisdom. The thesis was right, and Whistle bec…

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The internet has a 15-year tic. Every cycle, somebody figures out a new way to manufacture attention at scale. Every cycle, the platforms reward it for a while. Every cycle, the correction comes and wipes out the operators who confused volume for value.

Clipping is the next one. And sports, of all places, is best positioned to be the category that figures out how to do it right.

The Cycle Is Real

The pattern is well established at this point.

2007: Splogs. Automated sites scraped RSS feeds, republished stolen content, wrapped it in AdSense, and waited for search traffic. Google caught up.

2009: Content farms. Demand Media paid freelancers $3.50 per article and published a million pieces a month on eHow. The company went public in 2011. Google’s Panda algorithm launched the same month and erased 40% of their traffic. The stock never recovered.

2014: Click farms. Warehouses of phones in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines manufactured fake likes and follows for under a cent per interaction. Instagram’s 2014 purge deleted millions of fake accounts. Facebook’s 2014 SEC filing estimated 83 million false accounts on the platform.

2024-2026: AI slop. Generative tools made content production approach zero marginal cost. A Kapwing study found 21% of YouTube Shorts recommended to new users were AI-generated slop. 278 slop-only channels accumulated 63 billion views and an estimated $117 million in annual ad revenue. YouTube terminated channels. Brands pulled spend. The correction is still rolling out.

2026: Clip farms.

The latest version does not use bots or AI, it uses people and that is what makes it harder to detect and harder to stop.

Vyro is the cleanest example. Creators post campaigns and then clippers cut long-form videos into short-form clips and post them to TikTok, Reels, and Shorts from their own accounts. Vyro tracks views and pays out at roughly $3 per 1,000 views, no follower count required, no audience needed. MrBeast has reportedly paid out over $100,000 to early clippers. Some operators on similar platforms claim $20,000 to $30,000 per month in payouts.

The pitch is decentralized distribution. Every clipper becomes a micro-distributor extending a creator’s reach across thousands of accounts. The clips look organic because they come from real people. The content appears native because it sits on personal feeds. The scale is theoretically infinite because anyone can join.

This is the same pitch every prior cycle made. The mechanics change, the language gets refreshed, but the core promise is always the same: you can manufacture attention faster and cheaper than anyone competing on quality….until you can’t.

Why This Cycle Hits Harder

AI slop has tells: warped hands, glossy textures, the uncanny smoothness that triggers your brain before you can articulate why. Platforms are building detection. YouTube joined C2PA for content credentials. TikTok added 1.3 billion AI labels. Pinterest built opt-out controls. The infrastructure to identify and downrank synthetic content is being built in real time.

Human slop has none of those tells.

A clip posted through a Vyro-style platform comes from a real person, on a real device, from a real account. The content is derived from legitimate source material. There is no synthetic media to flag, no AI watermark to detect. From the platform’s perspective, a clip from a paid clipper looks identical to a clip from a genuine fan.

The only difference is motivation. A genuine fan clips a moment because it resonated. A paid clipper clips a moment because the campaign brief told them to. The engagement that follows reflects either a real audience relationship or an algorithm responding to volume signals. The metrics dashboard cannot tell the difference, but the long-term value of the two is not remotely comparable.

Ed Abis, CEO of Dizplai, put it precisely in a comment on the LinkedIn post that prompted this piece: “Paid fans clipping content from their own accounts. Looks organic, scales infinitely, costs a fraction of paid media. The question is whether cash-motivated clippers perform the same as genuine fans. If the connection isn’t real, the engagement won’t be either.”

That is the cycle’s tell. It works in the short term but it collapses in the long term, every single time.

Why Sports Is the Best-Positioned Category

From our POV, here is where the story turns...Most categories are going to ride this cycle into the ground because they have to. Music has been gamed by streaming farms for a decade. Mobile gaming installs are bot-saturated. E-commerce reviews are mostly fake. The damage is already done. Those categories are trying to pull out of a tailspin.

Sports has not entered the tailspin yet. Sports also has structural advantages no other category has.

Live games can’t be faked. The product itself is the most defensible content asset on the internet. There is no AI-generated version of Shohei Ohtani at the plate or a Jude Bellingham free kick. The source material is real, scarce, and premium-priced.

Fan tribes are real and durable. Every team has a built-in audience that already cares. Every athlete has a community that already follows. The trust layer is pre-existing. It does not need to be manufactured. It needs to be channeled.

Athletes own their personal IP. NIL changed the equation at the college level. Athlete brand-building changed it at the pro level. Sports has more individual creator IP than any other content category, and that IP is anchored to real people with real fan relationships.

Rights holders control the source. Every clip has to start somewhere. Sports leagues, teams, and properties own the broadcast feeds and the official content. They have leverage other categories don’t.

Put those four together and sports has every input it needs to build a version of clipping that does not collapse. The question is whether the industry will use those advantages or surrender them by adopting the open marketplace model that’s about to flame out everywhere else.

Learn More About Disruptive Play

Disruptive Play Partners with Investors, Founders and C-suite Leaders Challenging Industry Norms at the Intersection of Sport, Media and the Creator Economy.

DISRUPTIVE PLAY: Here’s The Sports Playbook for Doing Clipping Right

Four moves rights holders, leagues, athletes, and brand partners should be making now to build the version of creator distribution that compounds instead of corrects.

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Last week, S&P Global dropped its latest global sports media rights report. The headline: $67.34 billion in 2026. A 9.6% year-on-year increase.

Cue the victory laps.

But look at where that $67 billion actually sits. The NFL commands $12.6 billion in global media rights - triple the value of its nearest rival, the Premier League at $4.2 billion. The NBA lo…

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My daughter swipes at the TV. She has never known a world where a screen did not respond to her touch. She is not breaking the rules as she does not know the rules exist. The device has always worked that way for her.

Last Saturday, Twitch streamers Lacy and Sketch were sitting courtside at the Iowa vs. Illinois Elite Eight game at the Toyota Center in H…

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Every March, the NCAA tournament becomes the most talked-about event in American sports. Office brackets take over the workplace. Group chats blow up for two straight weeks. Upsets dominate every timeline for 48 hours straight. The tournament’s cultural gravity is real, and it’s built on one thing: emotional proximity. Fans don’t care about “the tournam…

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The FCC published a formal inquiry this month into live sports distribution in America. Most of it is regulatory boilerplate, but one number in MB Docket No. 26-45 deserves the attention of every team owner, league executive and conference commissioner in the country:

To watch every NFL game in a single season, a fan now needs access to up to 10 differen…

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Preface:

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.

Last week's Disruptive Play post sparked a question worth modeling: what happens when the IOC stops treating athlete-owned distribution as a threat to the broadcast model and starts treating it as the thing that makes the broadcast model more valuable?

The first half of this piece is grounded entirely …

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When D‑1 athletes become official broadcast endpoints, the rules of sports media start to bend.

For years, two primary forces have been reshaping sports media.

The first = leagues and live.
Streaming versus cable. Tech versus legacy networks. Bundles versus unbundled. Skinny bundles versus pay per view. The fight over who controls the live rights window an…

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On New Year’s Eve 2025, thousands of people gathered at Brooklyn Bridge to watch a fireworks display that didn’t exist.

An AI-generated video showing a spectacular fireworks show over the bridge had gone viral on TikTok. The video looked real and the production quality was flawless. The event details seemed legitimate… People believed it, shared it, and …

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Welcome Back to our 2026 Predictions - Part I established how distribution is being rewritten: creators and athletes as infrastructure, global discovery over territorial control, live sports and human curation as premium in an AI world.

Now the harder question: How does this make money?

Part 2 explores three critical shifts:

1. New sports IP becomes investable

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The sports business isn’t collapsing in 2026 but it can no longer pretend the old model still works.

• Fans are forming globally through social feeds, not locally through family tradition.

• Creators and athletes control audience attention in ways leagues never could.

• Live, human experiences matter more than ever in a world flooded with AI-generated content.

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Predictions are tricky. The sports industry has always balanced tradition with transformation, but in 2025 the pace of change accelerated across distribution, fandom, and monetization.

At Disruptive Play, we do not predict to sound smart in hindsight. We predict in order to surface pressure points early, before shifts become obvious or irreversible.

2025 …

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The last few Disruptive Play posts have been about big shifts.

• How fandom is becoming global.

• How distribution is changing.

• How culture and creators are reshaping sports faster than the industry expects.

This post lives in the same world. It just happens to be a lot more fun.

Because sometimes the future of sports does not show up as a deck or a rights deal…

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For most of modern sports history, fandom grew regionally. You became a fan of the team your family watched, in the city where you lived, consuming broadcasts designed specifically for your market. Geography shaped identity, and identity shaped behavior. The economics reflected that world: domestic rights carried the business, international rights were …

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